YMMV / Trash Taste

• Awesome Moments:
  • They organize a chess tournament with five other YouTubers, and the inexperienced ones get some coaching from Grand Masters to even out the skill level. Despite this, Connor is still the most experienced and is expected to win, and it's down to Garnt vs Connor in the finals. Garnt gets a victory in his first game of the match, and in the second, despite being a great disadvantage and being short on time, triggers a draw by repetition that lets him walk away with an overall win!
  • When talking about bugs, Joey recounts how his father deals with them: by moving so fast he can grab the cockroach by hand before crushing it. In the same clip he brings up one moment where his father, in his youth, idly swung a steak knife at a fly resting on a table and managed to cleanly decapitate it.
  • Garnt recounts his experiences with a crazy neighbor who had a Hair-Trigger Temper about the noise level and loved to use his status as a former cop to threaten people. During one of his last days at the apartment, before he moved out, his neighbor showed up again for one final confrontation, and dared him to punch him so he could get an excuse to get the cops involved. Garnt held his ground, firmly told him to back off, and was like "You don't know who you're dealing with here. I was a monk. I will not punch you. I am in maximum zen mode."
  • Joey eating a whole ghost pepper as the "punishment" for reaching $150K in donations during a charity stream was awesome on its own, but it takes on a new level if you watch his solo content, as two days before the stream, he'd filmed a video with Connor where they eat an incredibly spicy ramen^note the menu's spice rating gave it 12 peppers, for context that even had Connor in serious pain. The day after that, Joey got his COVID-19 booster shot, which hit him hard and caused him to have very little sleep the night before the stream...which lasted for 24 hours.
  • In episode 179, Pete recounts an experience where he, just out of high school, interned at a morning show at a Kansas radio station, eventually moving up to become a main cast member. His coworkers began making him the Butt-Monkey of the show and made fun of him with increasing frequency and intensity. When he informed the team that he wanted to leave, the station bluntly said they were planning to fire him anyway, but they'll play up his leaving as a big meltdown and milk it for all it's worth. This did expose him to a lot of backlash from the audience, and despite the support from his acting coach he had difficulty firmly refusing the team. His refusal was even met with some harsh parting words from the studio. Later that day, his teacher called in, not knowing Pete was at the studio, and tore into the morning show team for taking advantage of an intern like that, and this let Pete leave knowing that at least there was an audience member who had his back.
  • In episode 191, Connor recounts his experiences dealing with bullies. Though he didn't actively look for trouble, he used to go into a blind rage if physically threatened. While Connor was showing his little brother around the campus one day, one of the more petty bullies slapped Connor in the face and taunted him with a "what are you gonna do about it?" Not wanting to be ridiculed in front of his own brother, Connor immediately went to town on the bully, shrugging off three others trying to break up the fight.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Right after one sponsor segment, there was a several seconds long clip wherein Connor pretends to be masturbating, complete with hand jerking motion under the table, head tilted backwards, closed eyes and moaning. Meanwhile Joey and Garnt stare in the other direction at something off-camera, only to be turning their heads around when they first hear Connor, wearing dull expressions. Then it cuts towards the conversation of the podcast, and this incident is never mentioned again.
• Bile Fascination: Considering Episode 68 tackled Geno Samuel's comprehensive work in documenting the Real Life The Truman Show-turned-Black Mirror life of Christine (formerly Christian) Weston Chandler (the author of Sonichu), the episode actively straddled the line between this and an impartial appreciation of the collective social failings that made them.
• Come for the X, Stay for the Y: As the boys frequently lampshade, they don't actually talk about anime that much for an anime-themed podcast. People may come for anime, but they stay for for the zany challenges, guest discussions, humorous personal anecdotes and, ultimately, the Top Gear (UK) -esque chemistry that the boys have (which they also lampshade).
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Almost the entire first third of episode 8 is about hentai and eroge.
  • Episode 20, with "Queen of Degeneracy" Sydney as a guest speaker, opens with a discussion of some of the weirdest sex toys they have seen, and continues into her recounting her first experience with a very graphic eroge.
    Connor: How is this more lewd than the Shibuya Kaho episode?
    • In that same episode, Sydney offhandedly mentions that there are some pornographic doujins she has seen that she wasn't really into, like the ones featuring dead babies. Connor reacts with disgust, whispering words of shock, while Joey grins at the camera.
  • Episode 25 is entirely about hentai — the boys pick three shows to get the other two to watch, with some of their picks reaching into So Bad, It's Good territory (for one reason or another) to elicit greater reactions out of the others. One of the shows discussed is, as Garnt put it, "so ridiculous and so offensive that it's not even a turn-off any more and it becomes hot", and Joey chose it solely to see how Connor would react to it.
  • During the Cycling Special, Garnt starts ranting about how much cycling sucks, and during the rant he ends up dropping this gem:
    Garnt: Chess? I can do that, easy win against Connor, no fucking problem. Drifting? What's the worst thing that can happen during drifting? Roll-over, crash and die? Who the fuck gives a shit, that would make for great content!
  • Chris Chan arguably lives and skip-ropes on the line, which became the source of fascination and horror for Episode 68.
    Connor: Every single time you want to root for Chris, you hear [that she's done something worse] and you're like "for fuck's sake!"
  • Joey killing a fish during the Cooking Special? A bit too gruesome, Garnt and Connor's reaction to the whole scene? Absolutely hilarious.
    Garnt: OH MY GOD JOEY STOP! THAT THING IS ALREADY DEAD.
    Connor: ITS BLOOD IS EVERYWHERE.
  • Episode 144 goes back into hentai, but this time the theme is "cursed" titles^note works with a well-deserved reputation for being offensive, disgusting, controversial, or just too unappealing to recommend, with each of the boys having two categories to choose a title from for them all to watch. Some instances go so far into Fan Disservice territory that they stop being horrified and start laughing, and one show's Ghost Stories-esque English Gag Dub has them laughing at how the dialogue is so offensive and ridiculous, with Joey specifically noting that those jokes would not fly in today's culture.
  • Episode 149 diverges into a discussion of My Life as Inukai's Dog, which just escalates into their collective disbelief on just how close it has skirted into Bestiality Is Depraved. And then breastfeeding gets involved.
• Fan Nickname: After the very first episode, no less!
  • Garnt is now commonly called GiggUK, after he mentioned some fans pronounced his YouTube name like that.
  • Joey is now called "The Hentai Man", after his Youtube nickname (The Anime Man) and the fact his Twitter feed is, well, full of hentai.
  • Connor is "The 93%", because at some point that's how much of his viewerbase was female.
  • More generally, the hosts are almost universally referred to as "the boys."
  • Connor also got nicknamed "Cannur", stemming from Amelia's mispronunciation of his name after he sends her a superchat.
  • Connor earned the nickname "ChokeDawgVA" from the one time he blundered hard in the Chess Tournament Arc 2, and since then it keeps coming back whenever he fumbles during a game.
  • Chris Broad earned the nickname "Mr. Affable" after he used that word and the boys loved the ring of it.
  • After the boys discussed the ways people get their names wrong, expect the fans to jokingly use the same wrong names for them.
  • Garnt has "little baby man" after it's revealed that it's one of Sydney's pet names for him.
  • As Joey has been talking less about anime and more about manga, he sometimes gets referred to as "Josh the Manga Lad".
• Fanfic Fuel: While everyone managed to stay safe during the earthquake on 16 March 2022, it spawned an idea of "What if two of the boys actually died in the earthquake and the subsequent episodes are just the sole survivor hallucinating them?" This idea gave rise to the biggest meme of 2022: The Dark Timeline, where Garnt is the sole survivor and starts dabbling in alternate universes and time travel to save the others. As time went on, the complexity kept escalating, introducing new alternate universes and more alternate versions of the cast, creating a colossal mess that can put the Nasuverse to shame.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Generally with other otaku or adjacent subcultures, like the English VTuber audience. They are also fairly well-known within the Two Best Friends Play fandom thanks to their podcast going off on irreverent tangents in a similar manner to the Super Best Friendcast and its direct successor Castle Super Beast.
  • With Abroad In Japan, as guest episodes with Chris are highly regarded in the fandom.
• Gateway Series: The hosts' chemistry will often get people who were only following one of the boys to check out the other's content. If a guest is involved, audience members can be led to checking out the guest's main content too.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Given their discussion of convention attendants with No Social Skills in episode 20 and the numerous times that they've called out such behavior throughout the series, the standout poor conduct of a few audience members in their panel at MCM Comic Con London in May 2022 goes to show that there's always that guy who will give the fanbase a bad name. This becomes a point of reflection in episode 103, recorded right after the convention.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • Since Studio Ghibli and most of their films hold a near Sacred Cow status amongst many, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Garnt ended up receiving a good deal of backlash from fans after admitting to hating most of them in episode 21.
  • There's a general trend of Joey receiving backlash for many of his takes, such as in the DreamHack Melbourne panel, where he claimed that Hitori, the main character of Bocchi the Rock!, was too introverted to relate to.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Mudan, one of the podcast's editors, also edits videos for Joey, Connor, and his own content. He's able to edit hours of footage down to about half an hour of highlights. His appetite and aptitude for work is incredibly memorable.
  • During Anime Expo, a fan nicknamed "Truck-kun" was able to get Connor to fall for a Deez Nuts joke, spawning many memes from the fandom.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Several things they discuss invoke disgust among themselves and the audience, especially when bizarre foods or strange behaviors or kinks get discussed.
  • Episode 68 is filled with this as it goes into the background of Chris Chan and the lengths to which trolls would go to provoke them. It even opens with a content warning. Reactions from everyone on the podcast frequently flip between concern, amusement, and disgust, with one particular tidbit causing Connor, Joey, and Garnt to all recoil in horror at the same time.
• Periphery Demographic: Although intended to be an anime-themed podcast (though it has largely shifted away from this), the wide range of topics, the humorous stories and the chemistry between the hosts, has attracted many fans outside of the anime community.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • As the setup for episode #4, "How to NOT Buy Anime Figures", the guys shopped for anime figures at four different stores in Akibahara, with each trying to do two random challenges at each store, such as "Buy a Neon Genesis Evangelion figure", "Ask a clerk if they sell anything from Boku no Pico", "Buy the most expensive figure in the store", or "Buy a non-human furry figure". There were also a number of other challenges whose winners were determined during the episode, such as "who got the closest to their budget limit" and "whose purchase was closest to $69".
  • This setup was brought back for episode 79, where the boys spent a grand total of $10K on figurines between four stores, with each having challenges to do at the stores. Some of the challenges included: Joey had to try to find "a figure who could beat Goku" and "an FGO character that Garnt hasn't pulled yet", Garnt had to do one squat for each piece of Re:Zero merch he saw and ask a clerk in Japanese to recommend him a figure, and Connor had to get a non-anime figure and a figure from an anime that Joey had watched in 2021. As in episode 4, there were also overarching challenges.
• Spiritual Successor: To Pod Taku as an anime podcast hosted by high profile anime YouTubers including Gigguk, which the hosts themselves have freely acknowledged. Joey and Connor were even regular listeners of PodTaku until its end.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
  • Some grim anecdotes may fall into this, as well as when they review certain works with dark themes. The boys also have varying thresholds on what they can take seriously/allow something to affect them when consuming media. For example, nearly all of them would take seriously-written works like No Longer Human and Goodnight Punpun pretty straight (even reverentially) despite their bleak content. However:
  • When it figures in Hentai, it turns a bit more contentious. ShinDoL's Metamorphosis, for them, seems to suffer from Angst Dissonance. At the same time, Kuroinu: Kedakaki Seijo wa Hakudaku ni Somaru's reveling in Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil and Mind Rape disgusts Connor visibly while the over-the-top-ness of it makes it "zero back to hot" for Garnt and Joey.
  • Dark/true crime topics also tend to be treated with less seriousness, if only perhaps to make it a bit more tolerable to discuss. Aki's consumption and tackling of true crime in her videos, as well as Garnt's unfortunate connection with Mr. Anime fall under this as well. This may also apply to how you receive Geno Samuel's work on Chris Chan, which all the hosts pretty much recoiled from.
• Win Back the Crowd: In the midst of the "America Arc", fans criticized the guest episodes for their frequency and only having L.A.-based influencers on. This came to a head after the release of the episode with controversial streamer Pokimane. Luckily, newer episodes had warmer receptions, such as with NileRed, Chris Broad, and long awaited PewDiePie episodes.

---